Jodorowsky, Alejandro - Psychomagic - The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

Why are we afraid when we get close to archetypes by way of dreams, the imagination, or hallucinogenic substances?

The masses, people in general, only change their level of consciousness when they are in serious trouble, like, for example, following a natural disaster or terrorism. The masses are afraid of archetypes because archetypes are contained in higher levels of consciousness, and this produces fear in people who do not want to change. Each time we confront archetypes, we are confronting the dissolution of identity.

III

Have we built an invisible skin that we call ego?

No, the skin is not the ego. We are habituated to think that it is like that, but it’s not true. Let’s look deeper: Imagine the lion out roaming his territory. When he senses that some prey has entered his territory, he pounces. Also, there are plants whose perception reaches thousands of kilometers, birds that manage formidable distances in flight, or organisms that allow themselves to be felt very far away. And man? Well, through telepathy the human being can go around the world. Man has no limits.

So, what would be the ego?

Many times one speaks of the ego without understanding it. In reality, we have our essential being and another acquired part that permits an identification or an identity. This last one is the ego, an acquired identity, which is at the service of the essence. The ego can degenerate into diverted personalities, schizophrenics, or paranoids because it is the ego that notices the traumas and blows of life.

You admit that, for years, you had a gigantic ego. What can a person do in our world without an ego?

The ego is deaf. Deaf and blind. The ego has been tamed. This is the core in the Hindu doctrine. The ego must bend to the essence. In social activities, the biggest egos develop, like in the university where a person talks and talks even though no one is paying attention and no one ever listens. With this type of person there is no dialogue, only a long monologue. Life requires us to enter into dialogue and to listen to others. The ego is necessary like the shell of an egg: it envelopes the essence. All this about “kill the ego” is the craziness of gurus who, of course, are huge egomaniacs. I remember Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) who, in spite of being an extremely intelligent person, made his followers put his face on their T-shirts. In each of his books there were fifteen or twenty photos of his body. The ego can convert itself into something delirious. This man spent his life fighting against the ego and, in so doing, did nothing but strengthen his own. He confronted the egos of others but never his own. I look at the gurus like clowns. They are necessary, but they are big paper dolls.

Are we slaves of our desires?

We are always desiring things: more money, more objects. The world is pure desire. We get it in our heads that we have to resist aging: thousands of commercials encourage us to thicken our lips, lift our tits, stretch our dicks, firm our butts. We desire and we desire whatever we see in the advertisements or on the street. Every time I connect to the Internet, I’m sure to get four propositions: lengthen my phallus, lose weight, buy prostitutes, and win a fortune without working . . . or imaginary banks appear where you win millions. This is a serious problem with our society: it is full of desires to consume and to show off, but there is very little desire to be.

We should learn then, as you have told us so many times, to defeat desire?

The oriental schools pass on a very old wisdom that should be revised. They have greatly idealized the teachings of Buddha, and one must be careful. The legend of Buddha, if one looks at it well, is quite grim: a young rich kid abandons his wife and child to be carefree; he was someone who feared the most natural things in the world like death, old age, illness, poverty . . . But, of course, that doctrine assumes that the liberation of desire grants salvation, that salvation cannot come through rebirth, because it believes only in the rebirth or the pilgrimage of the soul—now that’s a lot to suppose, and it could be untrue.

If I do not believe in reincarnation, Buddha fails me. For him, it is necessary to escape from this life in order to not be reincarnated again, and this is an error. It is not necessary to escape from anything. It is necessary to live life. I do not know if reincarnation exists—we cannot know that. We cannot establish doctrines in which I must believe, communicating things by saying let’s stop the wheel on reincarnation, karma, and so forth. They are suspicious beliefs. In no way do I use them. Well studied, they are toxins for everyone.

IV

I would like to ask you about death . . .

What is death? Only a change, a mutation. We do not have death, but rather the change it assumes.

Where did you learn this?

( Laughter. ) Death is a word, and I began to learn it with the tarot. Death is Arcana XIII, and it does not have a name. It is situated in the middle of the deck. I had realized that once I was fifteen years old, I disappeared. Then I was thirty years old, then forty years old, and I continued disappearing. Right now I am seventy-four, and I am another person, yet I continue, content. When I am ninety I will be happy, when I am one hundred years old I will continue to be content. When I am three hundred, I will be stupendous, when I am a million years old, I will be a party.

Do you believe something of us stays when we die?

They asked a Zen master, “What is after death?” And he said, “I do not know. I still have not yet died.” I am here. But I know that what I am continues.

The Chariot tarot is sunken into the earth. Where is it going? The earth moves it and displaces it. We advance with the universe. What do I care about “after”? It was never important to me how I would be at eighty years old or a hundred or a million or sixty million. What is important is to know who I am now, not where I am going.

When you begin little by little to lose your identity, to become a generic human, you stop seeing yourself being any certain age. Then you stop identifying with time in general. Later, you are no longer a clear native of a motherland nor a speaker of a certain language. You do not see yourself in your name, you do not confuse yourself with the things you own, you begin to stop the identification.

But where do we stand in this vision of ourselves?

You hold on tight to who you are. To the happiness of life. You are happier every day, and you do not need the rigid costume of the character or of the personality. You are fluid, like water. Lao-tzu says, “One must be like water and take the shape of the vase that holds it.” Go through life taking shapes and this is magnificent. There is a moment when you accept it, and you tell yourself, “What I am is disappearing.” And once you are conscious, you are there all the time. You feel in your heels an abyss of total emptiness, and you go on advancing, like a light. And this light that you are knows it is going to swallow the abyss. This hope exists that you dissolve with an infinite joy into the cosmic ocean, and you are you, but you always accept that you are giving way to your consciousness. The ultimate gift you give is your consciousness.

When you arrive at death, the best you can offer is a perfect and enlightened consciousness, a clear consciousness, and that you must create, because if not, as Gurdjieff said, you die like a dog without offering consciousness and without building a soul.